Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals

Why it’s on the list: Storr and Choi state the moral objection to commercial society at full strength — that markets make people greedier and less trusting — then test it against World Values Survey data, experiments and cross-country comparisons, and find the correlation running the other way: repeated dealing with strangers rewards honesty more reliably than exhortation does.

Where I heard about it

• Brendan McCord — on his Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, closing the Capitalism, Morality, and Culture section as the empirical answer to the objection Rogan, Weber, Veblen and Greenfeld put most sharply. Shared March 2026; full transcription on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Markets — the institution on trial.
• Capitalism — the broader subject of the section.
• Morality — the dependent variable the book measures.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.